Expectation (Ghost Targets, #2) (6 page)

"Hadn't considered that," she grumbled to Reed. "Which one's the administrative building?"

"That one," Reed said, pointing to the largest of the clinic's four bone-white buildings. "But the girl in the research lab is expecting us, so we can go on there." He fell into a trot toward the nearest of the buildings, to their left.

Night was setting in, violet in the sky, but the grounds of the clinic glowed eerie white beneath a phalanx of streetlights. There wasn't a shadow, and she noticed with a sickening recognition the security cameras mounted on all the light poles. They weren't weapons—as far as she knew, no one in the world used the security system that nutcase Velez had invented for himself—but the cameras were the same model. She felt their electronic eyes passing over her and remembered that room. She shivered, and it had nothing to do with the cold.

Reed seemed to notice. He walked a little closer to her, and picked up his pace toward the lab.

The rough sandstone building was a squat square, sprawling thousands of square feet but mostly just one floor. The center of the building rose up to a second floor, putting Katie in mind of a squared-off top hat. The entrance was a single glass door, tinted almost black, set at an angle in the southeast corner of the building under a small overhang. Katie glanced up above the door where she'd have expected another camera to monitor their approach, but the wall was empty. She turned in surprise, and realized with a sense of dread that none of the cameras on the grounds ever turned this way. Reed seemed to grasp what she was thinking, because he only turned down a corner of his mouth and shrugged.

"It's never easy."

The door flew open as they approached, pushing the grim thought from her mind. A young woman met them on the threshold, with a deeply concerned look in her eyes. "Goodness!" she said, reaching out an arm toward Katie. "It's a nasty night out there! Come into the warmth."

The girl was in her twenties, wearing jeans and a cute yellow blouse, and a thin silver chain around her neck. She extended a delicate hand to Katie and said, "I'm Meg. Research assistant here."

Katie shook the offered hand and made introductions while she took in the building's lobby. Meg had short red hair, somewhere between curly and frizzy, and kind green eyes. The room they were in was a small foyer, with a receptionist stand directly opposite the entrance and a door into an empty guard booth just beyond it. Tinted windows gave a smoky view on the iridescent snowfall outside, and low-backed, minimalist couches stood along the interior walls on either side. The whole lobby was barely wider than a corridor, a big right angle with heavy steel security doors set into the interior wall at each end, and nothing else.

Katie nodded toward one of the doors. "I guess the lab is in there?"

Meg looked over her shoulder and then back to Katie with a nod. "Yes," she said. "Oh, right down to business. Good." There was a vacancy in her response that had nothing to do with mental acumen. She was grieving, too. Katie couldn't help thinking what a sad lot they all were.

Meg approached the door and opened it with a set of three small steel keys on a ring. Reed whistled low. "You've got to be kidding."

Meg looked over her other shoulder at him and shook her head with deep gravity. "There is nowhere in the world more important to human survival than this facility, Mr. Reed." She released the last of the locks and heaved the door open for them. "I understand you're here to help Eric, and he is a dear friend of mine, but you'd better come here with a real reverence for the secrecy of what we do."

Reed nodded briefly and slipped past her into the medical lab. Katie went more slowly and held Meg's eyes instead of checking out the room. "That's...that's got to be something of an overstatement, Miss Ginney."

The research assistant shook her head furiously. "Gevia represents the end to human aging. It's...they're still billing it as experimental, but it works. It
works
, and it's
safe
, and we know enough now to get it to everyone." She blinked, suddenly hesitant, and shrugged her shoulders. "Everyone in America, anyway."

Katie made a mental note of the girl's resentment, but changed tacks. "How much of a setback is it losing Barnes, though? It's my understanding that he's the brains behind Gevia—"

"Oh, he is," Meg nodded, eyes wide, "but we'll carry on. You have no idea how much he's done, how much he's accomplished, with his work. We can't let that go away, Miss Pratt. We can never allow that to happen." As she trailed off, her eyes drifted down the length of the huge, open lab to a far corner. The lights were dimmer there, and thin hospital curtains concealed the whole corner of the room. The shadows there danced with the electric green flicker of monitoring equipment, and Katie heard or imagined the soft hiss and whine, the idle beeps tracking a weak pulse behind the curtains. Some of the color fled from her face.

"He's here?"

Meg must have heard the horror in her voice, because her eyes snapped to Katie's with a burning intensity. "It's the only place he's
safe
," she said. "He's famous. You probably can't understand, but when I studied him in medical school they talked of him like a god. The man unraveled the secrets of death, Miss Pratt. Nothing in medical science rivals that. Not refrigeration, not penicillin, not even the cancer vaccine."

Katie frowned. "I thought he worked on the cancer vaccine."

"He did," Meg said. "And even that doesn't compare to what he's doing here." She took a deep breath, worshipful, and then squared her shoulders and turned toward the corner that kept drawing her eyes. "Come with me," she said. "I'll introduce you."

They headed across the pristine tiled floor. Everything was white—the floor, the ceiling, the massive filing cabinets that lined all four walls, broken only by the two doors out into the lobby and another two opposite, that probably led to a bathroom, maybe a storage closet. The floor of the lab was broken regularly by islands, tall lab tables eight feet long and four feet across, each of them bisected by a long row of connections for the myriad heaters and burners and meters and miscellaneous research apparatus stored in the cabinets beneath. Katie thought back to the chemistry lab she'd used in high school class, and she could recognize the setup, but this was far more sophisticated.

The tabletops were clearly interactive desktops, and the ghostly holographic projection of a white rat hovering over the second desk to her left suggested they might all be 3-D desktops. She couldn't fathom the expense of setting up this many stations with that level of technology, especially for a staff of, apparently, two.

As soon as that thought crossed her mind, she asked the question. "You said you're the research assistant here. How many researchers work in this facility?"

"In
this
 facility?" Meg tossed Katie a look of incredulity. "One. Two. Uhh...look, we're the only ones allowed in here. It's just Eric and me." She frowned. "And Cohn."

"Cohn is a scientist?"

Meg snorted. "Hardly. Ellie Cohn is our military liaison. The army put her here. She's got full access to Eric, and she's
always
 here. All she does is interfere."

Katie watched Meg out of the corner of her eye. "Does the military involvement corrupt Eric's research?"

"No," she shook her head slowly. "Umm...no. No. He's too careful for that. You can compensate for external factors—" She took a deep breath. "Sorry. No, they just make everything complicated. They get in the way. Gevia..." she trailed off, her eyes on her hands, then suddenly met Katie's gaze with eyes begging for understanding. "Gevia shouldn't be a national resource, Miss Pratt. The army shouldn't be involved at all. We should have dispensaries set up in every cul-de-sac and dirty little village across the world." She sighed. "Eric could've done that. He was working on logistics for it for a while, but Ellie put a stop to that."

She stopped in front of the curtain and took another deep breath. She looked over at Katie. "They've got their own plans, Miss Pratt, that have nothing to do with medicine. I don't trust them." She reached up, eerily slowly, and then flipped the curtains back with an almost casual gesture. "He trusted them, though."

Eric Barnes looked peaceful. He lay at rest on a narrow but luxurious bed, nothing like the mechanical monsters still in use in Argentina hospitals, Katie thought. Her lips twisted into a sardonic grimace. There weren't any of the garish monitors she'd imagined, either, but a single computer monitor suspended on the wall above him with readouts for each of dozens of monitors on him. His IV fed from a pressurized supply hidden somewhere in the bed, and there was no sign of breathing machinery. She recognized the electrodes hooked up to his arms and legs, intended to stimulate muscle action, and she shook her head.

"How much does this cost?"

"It doesn't matter," Meg said, and her tone brooked no further discussion. The sheets on his bed bunched around his waist, revealing a trim upper torso, surprisingly fit for someone in an office job. He was strikingly handsome, distinguished, and the whole setup gave the appearance of a man who'd just dozed off while reading. A plush armchair stood nearby, with a bedstand, and Katie got the feeling he had pretty regular company. She glanced at Meg and saw her eyes fixed on Eric's face.

It was a good face, still and serene, high cheekbones and good thick brown hair—almost black. She knew that couldn't last, no matter how expensive the setup. He would wither. His cheeks would sink, his strong arms would shrivel down to twigs. He would lose his color, and eventually he would lose his hair. Medical science had come a long way in the years of Barnes's research, but they still couldn't fake humanity in a piece of warm meat. She knew that all too well.

She had to fight down an angry emptiness at the thought, at the images that swam up with it, and she turned on her heel and darted away just as a surprised Reed stepped up past her. She heard him take over the interview, asking Meg probing questions about Eric's contacts, his most recent projects, and the political pressure he was under. Katie couldn't linger long enough to learn the answers. She almost stumbled in her haste and caught herself on the edge of one of the lab tables. Trying to think of anything but the man behind the curtain, she examined the table, but it was covered in notes that meant nothing to her.

She moved to the next table, where Reed had somehow activated the controls for the holograph projector. There, three human models hung suspended in the air above it. One was clearly a muscle-mass frame, with skin and bone stripped away, and another showed only organs, and the third...she considered it for some time before guessing it was a graphic representation of an immune system, but she couldn't be sure of that. She looked for some notes on the table's surface, but again it was incomprehensible to her.

Katie turned away, and her eyes fell on the long rows of cabinets along the wall. Her head tilted as curiosity took over, and she approached the white steel doors with a look of interest. Something in her expression must have concerned the young research assistant, because she rushed across the room to intercept Katie. The girl was three steps too slow.

"What's this?" Katie asked, pulling open the nearest cabinet door.

"It's nothing," Meg said, a touch breathless. She reached out to push the door closed, but Katie held it open with one rigid finger. She bent forward to look more closely, even as Meg repeated herself. "It's nothing!"

The cabinet she'd picked had five shelves filled with identical black leather-bound books. Their spines were empty of any titles or other identifying text, but they showed varying ages and use, a progression of decay from left to right, top to bottom. The spines of the books on the top shelf were cracked and worn, almost gray with use. The whole set looked more expensive than any lab notebooks Katie had ever seen, but everything about this clinic astonished her.

She reached for a random book on the shelf, but Meg physically intervened, squeezing awkwardly into the narrow gap between Katie and the books. "What are you doing? These have nothing to do with—"

"What are they?" Katie asked. She took a step back, which clearly put the girl more at ease. Meg glanced toward the researcher's resting place, then visibly relented.

She knelt, sinking down on her heels, and plucked a book off the second shelf from the bottom. She flipped open the heavy cover and passed it to Katie, who found a scrawled, barely legible script on the slightly yellowed, lined pages. Halfway down the first page in an oversized curl, she read a title. "
Teleos
, a novel by Eric Barnes." Three lines farther down, the novel started with a cramped ten-line paragraph that was entirely marked out. Meg glanced over the top of the book and blushed.

"Oh," she said. "He, uh...he scrapped the prologue." She flipped forward six or seven pages, and Katie saw every line on each of those pages neatly scratched out with a single line of black ink. Meg turned to a page labeled "Chapter One" and said, "Start there."

Katie started into the first page, and lost herself more in the process of puzzling out his handwriting than in the actual storyline. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a full page of handwriting. It brought back memories from grade school and even earlier. She remembered her dad teaching her how to scratch her name onto a magnetic drawing board when she was tiny. She'd written him a letter from the Academy, an actual letter on paper, and he had cried when he read it, according to her mom. He'd always called it a lost art.

She snapped from her memories with a start, and her eyes flashed to the cabinet packed full of these writing books. She counted forty books on the top shelf, which put two hundred in this one cabinet, and by the looks of it he'd filled at least a hundred, hundred and twenty of them. Her eyes grew wide. "Are these all...." She trailed off, then took a step back and looked down the long row of cabinets, dozens of them, and her jaw dropped. "Are these all full of—"

"Hah! What?" Meg's face split in a smile. "No. No." She took the book from Katie's numb fingers and snapped it smartly shut, then put it away and closed the cabinet. She caught Katie's eye before she opened the next cabinet over to the right. It held shelves full of more scientific equipment. Meg gave a flourish, and shook her head, still smiling. "I thought you were some kind of super sleuth, picking that one cabinet—"